Talk Nation Radio: Peter Enns on How Public Punitiveness Led to Mass Incarceration

Peter Enns is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. He is also team leader of the Institute for Social Science theme project on the Causes, Consequences, and Future of Mass Incarceration in the United States.

His research focuses on public opinion, representation, mass incarceration, and inequality. Peter also teaches courses on quantitative research methods. Peter’s new book, Incarceration Nation, (Cambridge University Press) explains why the public became more punitive in the 1960s, 70s, 80, and 90s, and how this increasing punitiveness led to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States.

Peter received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2007) and his undergraduate degree from Colorado College (1998). Prior to graduate school, he taught high school Spanish for three years in Baltimore, MD, through Teach For America. Additional information on his research and teaching is available on his personal website.

“Meadow and field have I forsaken,
That deeps of night from sight enroll;
A solemn awe the deeps awaken,
Rousing in us the better soul.
No wild desires can longer win me,
No stormy lust to dare and do;
The love of all mankind stirs in me,
The love of God is stirred anew.”

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This World Map Shows The Enormity Of America’s Prison Problem JAN. 24, 2014

About 2.4 million people live behind bars in America — the highest number in the world. That’s a little more than 0.7% of the population and more than 700 for every 100,000 people. This world map illustrates how disconcerting that is.

Every day, more Americans agree the War on Drugs has failed and must change. The Smarter Sentencing Act will save billions of dollars and ease dangerous overcrowding in prisons by reducing sentences for non-violent drug offenders. It will also help strengthen communities and reduce racial injustice.

Freedom works and Portugal proves this out with real world stats that the ‘WHOLE’ world can learn from!

Jul 19, 2012 What Happened When Portugal Decriminalized Drugs?

While many critics in the poor and largely conservative country attacked the sea change in drug policy, fearing it would lead to drug tourism while simultaneously worsening the country’s already shockingly high rate of hard drug use, a report published in 2009 by the Cato Institute tells a different story.

Before the mid-1800s, American and British citizens – even in large cities – were expected to protect themselves and each other. Indeed, they were legally required to pursue and attempt to apprehend criminals. The notion of a police force in those days was abhorrent in England and America, where liberals viewed it as a form of the dreaded “standing army.”

Mass Incarceration Visualized In this animated interview, the sociologist Bruce Western explains the current inevitability of prison for certain demographics of young black men and how it’s become a normal life event. “We’ve chosen the response of the deprivation of liberty for a historically aggrieved group, whose liberty in the United States was never firmly established to begin with,”

The Thirteenth Amendment forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Crops stretch to the horizon. Black bodies pepper the landscape, hunched over as they work the fields. Officers on horseback, armed, oversee the workers. To the untrained eye, the scenes in Angola for Life: Rehabilitation and Reform Inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary, an Atlantic documentary filmed on an old Southern slave-plantation-turned-prison, could have been shot 150 years ago.

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